Throughout history, scientists have been interested in measuring and characterizing subatomic particles. In modem times, scientists have designed various devices for studying these particles.
One approach has been the use of systems which incorporate pixels to collect and integrate, for example, electron charges or hole charges and convert them into corresponding voltage signals. These detector systems then read out the voltage signal from the pixels that are hit by the particles to obtain information about the particles.
Early detector systems could not read out the signal in time for the next particle's arrival. As a result, the systems could not distinguish among the particles because the signals became mixed.
Scientists circumvented this problem by stopping the system during the readout of a signal from the detector, and then proceeding to the next collision. It normally takes, however, a long time—on the order of several seconds—to read out the signal from the entire pixel array. This stop-and-go method limits the exploration of the particle physics in many ways.
Conventional detectors comprise macropixel arrays adapted to operate at high speeds, but produce low-resolution data. Still other conventional detectors comprise micropixel arrays and provide high resolution data, but read pixel-by-pixel to determine which micropixels contain event data which is time-consuming and inefficient, resulting in low speed imaging.
Thus, there is a need for an imaging system that operates continuously by reading out information only from those pixels which have been hit by the particles. Such a system would make the overall readout speed much faster and quickly complete the readout process and prepare the detector for a subsequent round of collisions, thereby providing high-speed, high-resolution imaging.